The present invention relates to a technique for synthesizing tones of wind instruments that generate tones in response to vibration of a reed.
Heretofore, there have been proposed tone synthesis apparatus of a physical model type (i.e., physical model tone generators) for synthesizing tones by simulating the tone generating principles of musical instruments. Among such tone synthesis apparatus are techniques disclosed in R. T. Schumacher “Ab Initio Calculations of the Oscillations of a Clarinet”, ACUSTICA, 1981, Volume 48 No. 2, p. 75-p. 85 (hereinafter referred to as Non-patent Literature 1); and S. D. Sommerfeldt, W. J. Strong, “Simulation of a player-clarinet system”, Acoustical Society of America, 1988, 83 (5), p. 1908-p. 1918 (hereinafter referred to as Non-patent Literature 2). More specifically, Non-patent Literature 1 discloses a technique for simulating behavior of a clarinet by modeling a reed as a rigid air valve freely movable in its entirety, and Non-patent Literature 2 discloses a technique for simulating behavior of a clarinet by modeling a reed using a vibrating member in the form of an elongate plate fixed at one end (i.e., cantilevered vibrating beam).
However, although the reed of an actual wind instrument behaves complicatedly in response to actions of a human player's lip, the techniques disclosed in Non-patent Literatures 1 and 2 only simulate simple external actions on the reed. Thus, with these techniques, behavior of the reed of an actual wind instrument can not be reproduced faithfully, so that it has been difficult to synthesize tones sufficiently approximate to tones of an actual wind instrument.